The Bedroom Barricade
by Quartertofive
Summary: When the gang throws a New Years party, Sheldon has better things to do. But when he arrives home and find Amy in his bed, it might be the beginning of a new stage in their relationship.
1. Chapter 1

Sheldon clutched hard at his seat while the bus swerved through the streets of Pasadena like a demented hippopotamus on LSD. The bus was almost empty, but nevertheless assuming that the best defense was a good offense, he glared with unblinking fury at the two teenage hooligan boys across the aisle. It took less than four stops before they exchanged uncomfortable looks and moved to the back of the bus, along with their bubblegum and denim jackets.

The bus took a corner hard, almost hitting some drunken revelers who were busy turning the road into a debauched orgy. _Stupid Leonard_, he thought with irritation. _Stupid party. Stupid New Year's Eve._

It was all Penny's fault, obviously. Most things were, really. Throwing a party for the New Year. What a piece of dagnabit nonsense. He snorted loudly, earning him a sideways glance from the driver.

"The road!" Sheldon yelled. "Look at the road! You, sir, are in dereliction of your duty!" It wasn't the first time the man had behaved in a manner utterly callous of the sacred duty pressed upon him by the Area Rapid Transit System of Pasadena to protect the life and limb of his passengers. Of Sheldon's own life and limbs, in fact. "I intend to write a letter to your superiors. A stern letter!"

The driver shook his head, but at least he went back to concentrating on the road. _If I die, I'm going to blame Penny for this too. _Ever since that blond catastrophe of a woman had become a constant presence in Leonard's life, Sheldon's had become vastly harder. And now, this! His roomate, his best friend, his boon companion, wouldn't even drive him from the university at two in the morning on New Year's Day, just because Penny had convinced him throwing a party might be "fun."

"Hrumph," he added. Fun!

#

"Will my trials never be over?" Sheldon asked. It was perforce a rhetorical question, unfortunately. Clearly, none of his so-called friends was in any condition to answer.

Opening the door to his apartment, Sheldon had found utter chaos. Crumbs coated the carpet, empty bottles and cans stood on every available space, bedraggled tinsel drifted from the ceiling, and there were people there. Sprawled, snoring, smelly, sedentary, supine, sleeping people.

In his spot. On the floor. On the armchair. In his spot.

Sheldon stepped over Raj, asleep on an air-mattress, and crouched beside his sanctum. He picked up the least sticky looking empty beer bottle from the coffee table and prodded the man asleep on the couch until he turned his head.

He almost fell back, shuddering with horror. Barry Kripke was asleep on the couch, and drooling on his spot.

Kripke. His spot. Drool. Kripke. What was wrong with the universe? He could feel it stretching out of shape around him, like vertigo.

"Oh good lord." This was too much. He would go to sleep, and in the morning he would make Penny clean it all up. And dry-clean his cushion. _Again_.

He stomped away from the tortured horror that his living room had become and into his bedroom, and almost screamed.

There was someone in his bed.

He turned and ran from the room, skidding in the hall and almost falling down. Knock, knock, knock. Leonard. There was no answer. Knock, knock, knock. Leonard. Knock, knock, knock. Leonard. Nothing.

Fine! He opened the door and frowned. That wasn't Leonard.

"Howard!"

Wolowitz woke up with a start, along with Bernadette next to him. "Sheldon, hi."

"What have you done to Leonard?"

"Done to Leonard? Nothing, they're at Penny's," Howard said blearily, pushing hair out of his eyes.

"Why are you here?" Sheldon demanded.

Couldn't they see that this was just wrong? Just bizarre? The sun rising in the west or the gravitational constant being 17 or yogurt coming in green. People were supposed to stay in their own beds. People were supposed to stay out of his bed.

"Too drunk to drive," Bernadette said with a smile. She snuggled back up to Howard and closed her eyes. "It was a good party, you should have stayed," she murmured.

Drunk! Useless!

He would get no answers here. "I know Howard is a debased pervert, but Bernadette, I expected better from you!" Sheldon informed them and closed the door sharply.

Back to the living room - was that Stuart overflowing the armchair? - and out to the hall. He didn't even need a key! Penny's apartment was open. Drunk, irresponsible people. It would only served them right if a crazed circus clown with a chainsaw came in and dismembered the lot of them.

There was someone asleep on Penny's couch too, one of her little friends curled up under a blanket. How many people did it take to have a party, for heaven's sake? Couldn't they have managed with six or seven? Or two or three, and less alcohol? And food that didn't make crumbs?

He went into Penny's room and knocked on the wall above the couple's head. That always worked. Penny's wall had excellent acoustic properties.

Leonard sat up with a yell.

"There is someone in my bed!" Sheldon informed him. "You put some liquor sodden inebriate celebrant in my bed. Section 4, subsection 11 of the roomate agreement clearly states that bedrooms are off limits to the other roomate's guests except in cases of a fire drill or a Van Neumann plague requiring barricading all organic life forms in one space lest we be processed into grey goo by the nanobots."

"Sheldon, you're back." Leonard found his glasses and put them on. Clearly, he had not heard a word Sheldon had said. Alcohol's brain cell deadening after effects, no doubt.

"Were there nanobots, Leonard?"

"What?" Penny too had managed to surface to consciousness. "Amazing, I'm not even surprised you're here," she said.

"Did you put someone in my bed?" Sheldon demanded. Of course it was her.

"Yes!" Penny said. "I did. We ran out of places to put people. It was a great party."

"You can't do that!"

"It's Amy, Sheldon. Just Amy. She just needed a place to sleep."

Amy.

"Oh," Sheldon said, the wind quite out of his sails. That was different. That was…that was better? No, that was worse?

Amy was in his bed. He didn't know what that was. The universe was stretching out of shape again.


	2. Chapter 2

It had not been a great party. Not quite, not for Amy.

She had danced, and drunk, and laughed, and everything was fine, for a while. Like anyone. Then midnight had arrived and there she was, alone. No one to kiss and looks of sidelong pity from every quarter. Penny's sympathetic grimace, Bernadette's you-know-you-can-do-better raised eyebrow, delivered from the embrace of their own beaus.

It was a relief when the party had wound down, but then came the inevitable coupling off as Leonard and Penny had bundled everyone too drunk to drive off to bed, and Amy was standing in the middle with nowhere to go like it was that summer camp all over again.

"Amy will just sleep in Sheldon's bed," Penny had declared when there was no other way to make the puzzle pieces fit.

That was a very bad idea, one part of her knew. On the other hand, Sheldon's bed…

_I may never get another chance. _

So here she was, in Sheldon's bed, wearing a borrowed pair of Leonard's shorts and a shirt from Sheldon's closet. It was one of his stupid comic book ones, and it smelled like fabric softener. Then again, Sheldon usually smelled like fabric softener too. She could lie here and pretend, for a bit.

The door opened. Amy kept her eyelids lowered and her breath shallow. Was he going to run off again? She had heard him come in, take one look at her, and then bang about the apartment like squash ball. She hadn't expected him to come back.

He tiptoed into the room and closed the door behind him. She heard the rustle of fabric as he took his windbreaker off and hung it from the door. Then the shift of the bed under her as he sat down and took off his shoes.

Amy's heart started pounding faster. Would he actually change clothes? Here? Next to her? _Keep breathing, woman, _she sternly ordered herself, but the thought of Sheldon pulling off his shirt was enough to make her vision black out just a tiny bit.

And if he were to take off the shirt under the first shirt…

Her imagination couldn't even venture there. _Come on, Sheldon. Let's see some skin, boyfriend. _She bit her lip and tried not to move, peering through her eyelashes.

No such luck. Shoes was all she was going to get, apparently. Sheldon stood, took a blanket from the closet and lay down on top of the covers.

On top of the covers, yes, but next to her. She could feel his breathing and the weight of his body deforming the mattress. Just his presence, right there, still and quiet, was comforting and thrilling all at the same time. _And he can feel me, _she thought.

He held out for about 40 seconds, by Amy's count.

"Ridiculous," he muttered under his breath and got up again. He grabbed books off the shelf and started stacking them across the bed, forming a teetering barricade of books, comics and toys between her side and his side. He plopped down a book about trains right in front of her face, blocking her vision completely.

He lay back down rigidly. She didn't even need to see him. She knew he would be lying ruler straight, eyes firmly closed, determined to sleep and ignore her, no doubt.

Less than thirty seconds this time, before he shifted the train book away, opening up a little gap between them. From her perspective, his faced was framed by a big plastic robot-doll and a book on manifold topologies.

He was looking at her, Amy realized with a shock. His head turned stiffly towards her, eyes wide and unblinking, full of curiosity and confusion as they roamed over her face._ I'm not ever going to do better than this_, she thought, and then felt slightly guilty for spying on him.

Slow as molasses, Sheldon reached through the gap in the barricade, and came this close to touching her cheek. She could feel his fingers hovering there, but he didn't quite make it.

Sheldon rolled off the bed. She heard him hit the floor on his side. "Ouchie."

She sighed and closed her eyes. He hadn't ruled out an intimate relationship, he had said. Well, that had certainly been intimate, just not quite in the way she wanted. She heard him climb back into the bed and plug up the barricade, but by then alcohol, tiredness and loneliness were doing their bit.

Amy drifted off to sleep, and so she missed Sheldon's night of sleepless agony.

He built and rebuilt the barricade. He perched over her like a gargoyle, wondering if it was the done thing to roll her out of bed. He counted sheep, but he ended up counting Amy's breaths, and that did nothing for sleep. He counted catwomen, but all the faces turned into Amy's, and that did even less. He examined her sleeping form from every direction, hoping to find some clue. A button, perhaps, some way to turn off her presence that filled the room like the smell of bread baking and made sleeping an utterly ridiculous proposal.


	3. Chapter 3

"Sheldon?"

"Mm." Sheldon sat up and rubbed his eyes. Faint grey light filtered through the blinds, and it was very quiet. "Um-grm. What time is it?"

"Half past six in the morning," Amy said from the bed. "Why are you on the floor?" She was sitting up, the blanket around her shoulders - his blanket, thank you very much.

"No reason," he said, carefully looking at a point on the wall above and to the side of her left shoulder. "Sometimes, I sleep on the floor."

Sleeping on the floor, it turned out, was terrible. His back hurt, his neck was cramped, and he was shivering with the cold. But it had been the only option.

"You couldn't bear to spend a night in bed with me," Amy said.

Thank goodness she had said it! "You breathe so much! All the time!"

"So do you!"

"I'm allowed, it's my room." That made sense, completely.

"Fine!" Amy tossed off the blanket and stood up. "I'll go," she said, and suddenly her long, bare, very pale legs were right in front of his eyes.

Scandalous! He felt the heat creeping up his neck and cheeks. Ah, blushing - his cross to bear. He forced his gaze up her body, but received another shock on the way.

"That's my shirt."

Amy raised an eyebrow. "Want me to take it off?"

Yes? "No!"

This was about sex, wasn't it? He was pretty sure this was about sex. Why was everything about sex so much, all the time? Maybe there was research - it might be worth looking into, even if did mean a venture into sociology, or worse, psychology.

"Sheldon, I'm leaving." Amy informed him.

"Wait." Maybe it was better to do his own research. He had said he was working on it, hadn't he? "You'll catch a cold and your death and I will have to speak to your mother." That reminded him that he was also cold, and in pain, and really the victim here, and he shivered.

Amy hesitated, then sighed and folded those ridiculously long legs of her to sit next to him on the floor. She dragged the blanket off the bed and threw it about both of them. It was terribly musty and close, enough to make him hyperventilate just a little, but she was also warm as toast, so he decided to let the situation stand. Or sit, as the case my be.

Ever so slowly - like she thought he wouldn't notice, the sneak - Amy let her head sink onto his shoulder.

"Mmm. Nyargh," Sheldon said and twisted away. There had to be some limits, for heaven's sake.

It was almost three minutes before Amy spoke.

"Why is this so hard for you?" she asked, very quietly.

This? What was this, exactly? He didn't know how to answer that. Questions he couldn't answer were stupid questions. He was fine, thank you very much. It was everyone else that had the strange obsessions, with the touching and the hugging and again with all the sex.

He didn't turn to look at her, but he couldn't avoid seeing her legs again, and her hands, held together loosely in her lap. So much skin.

Longing, like a punch to the gut. Sheldon had never been stabbed, but he suspected he would prefer it to…to…to this. Whatever this was, this thing that would crash over him uninvited since he had met Amy. Something that wasn't him.

Yet there it was, painful as a knife. The something that he couldn't measure and couldn't count and didn't know the words for. Desire? For touch, for skin, for sex, for her?

He had never thought about being intimate with anyone, before he met her. Now, there was this, but that didn't mean it was a good idea.

"Sheldon?"

He had gotten lost in thought. Or in feeling, which was infinitely worse.

"Everyone is always so far away," he said. Somewhere on the other side of some deep chasm he could never quite see the shape of, but knew perfectly well was there. Best not to approach.

"Try," Amy suggested. "I'm right here."

Truth be told, she really was.

He supposed he could try. She was sitting crosslegged, right next to him, under the same blanket. It wasn't any effort at all to reach out and touch her bare knee.

It wasn't that he never touched people. He touched people all the time. Sometimes, it was necessary - handshakes at funerals, visits to the dentist - but this wasn't necessary, and that made all the difference.

He traced the shape of her bones under the skin and let his fingers draw some meaningless pattern, just to keep touching her. It was weird stuff, skin. Smooth but squishy, silky and moist at the same time. At least, Amy's was. She was very still, and breathing very slowly. Was that good or bad?

Sheldon took his hand back, not sure what he was supposed to do now. He looked at her face, hoping she would say something, and then he knew exactly what he was supposed to do, the information crashing into his brain as if delivered by air-drop.

Now, he was supposed to kiss her.

Problem was, Sheldon didn't kiss girls. Icky stuff, kissing. He had been above it on the playground, and that was how things had stayed.

Amy's eyes had drifted shut, eyelashes against her cheek. Her lips were parted. And he! He was leaning towards her too! Everything was happening in slow motion.

This wasn't him. Panic welled up in a blinding tide, like that time he had found a scorpion in the bathtub when he was nine. This was not something that Dr. Sheldon Lee Cooper did, so he could not do this and be Dr. Sheldon Lee Cooper, and if he wasn't that than what was point, precisely?

"There is no try!" he said.

Sheldon pushed Amy away and scrambled to his feet and then to the other side of the bed. Safe territory, with a barricade in the middle. He should have built that barricade higher. This was what came from people going in his room.

"There is no try. Yoda said that, did he," Sheldon added.

Amy was still on the floor. He could see just the top of her head. She stood up very slowly, moving like an old, weary woman. Slowly, she picked up her own clothes where she had folded them on the chair. Slowly, she bent down and picked up her shoes.

She held her stuff to her chest and looked at him. "Yoda."

"Yes. In Star Wars," Sheldon said.

"I can't do this anymore," she said.

"The Empire Strikes Back," he explained. Amy wasn't good at Star Wars, maybe she didn't understand.

"You make me feel so ugly," her voice broke, and Sheldon discovered there was something that felt worse than the stabbing sensation of longing he couldn't express after all.

Amy looked at him for a long, long moment. "Goodbye, Sheldon."

If…if he had been someone else, Sheldon knew, he might have read something in that look. But he was only himself and the gap was too wide. Someone else might have understood, and might have found words to make her stay, but he couldn't, and he didn't, and Amy walked out of his bedroom and didn't look back.


	4. Chapter 4

Amy stopped on the second floor landing to put her skirt on over the borrowed shorts and to pull on at least one of her cardigans. She sat down on the stairs and started to lace up her shoes, but her hands wouldn't finish the motion. She just sat there, frozen, one shoe on her foot and one in her hand.

It was amazing that she could tell from a baboon's MRI, but no clue about whether she herself was about to cry. And she was in her own brain. It didn't seem fair. Of course, the brain had so little to do with some things. Sheldon had taught her that, even if he had never learned it himself. The amount of things you could feel, in your gut and in your heart and on your lips. Who would have thought?

_I'm not going to cry, _she decided. She put on her other shoe, slung her bag over her shoulder and went down the stairs. Outside it was cold, cloudy and eerily quiet, everyone sleeping off the excesses of the night. She might have been the only person alive in greater LA. It was a new year. She had almost forgotten.

She started across the street to her car. New year, new start? _Did I just break up with Sheldon? _

Amy stopped right in the middle of the road, the words sinking in. Broken up. Single. Alone. She nearly turned around then. She could, she knew. She could go back up the stairs and let Sheldon make her a cup of tea and spend all day with him, talking about all the things that no one else ever cared about. They would trade looks and smiles and bad puns, and never mention what had happened, or hadn't happened, and she would go home alone.

"No," she said aloud, and got into her car._ I just broke up with Sheldon. _

It was an experience, Amy told herself. She wanted to know everything. She wanted to do everything, all the things she had never done. This, too, was a thing to have done. Now she knew what breaking up felt like. Somehow, that made her feel no better. It was possible she was going to cry after all. Where was the portable electroencephalogram when she needed it?

Someone knocked on the car window and Amy jumped. It was Howard, grinning hugely, Bernadette peering over his shoulder.

_What on earth? _Amy rolled down the window.

"How's it going? Get through the night ok?" he asked brightly, and then he winced. Bernadette's smile grew wider and even cuter. "Or, nevermind. Anyway, I wanted to catch you - how much do you know about rat brains?"

"I know everything about rat brains," Amy said. Well, everything anyone knew about rat brains. Brains could be really weird, even the tiny little ones.

"That's what I thought. There's a project we're working on with brain-computer links for a grant proposal, and we could use a neurobiologist," Howard said. "How about it? Come by sometime to check it out? See if you're interested? I'm in charge of hiring."

"You want to work with _me_?" Amy knew these sort of things happened, but not to her. She had never gotten a job by…knowing people. Other people knew people. Other people had contacts, called in favors, did networking. Amy just had awkward interviews - and a very impressive CV.

"It's a great project," Howard said defensively. "Even if most of us engineers don't have Ph.D's."

Oops. Had she insulted him? "No, no, I didn't mean that. I'll stop by. And check it out."

"Ok. Great." Howard still looked at her a little suspiciously. "How about this evening?"

"Sure. I'll be there," she said.

"Howie, I'll catch up with you," Bernadette said sweetly. Howard took the hint and left with a shrug. Bernadette practically stuck her head into the car. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"Well, last night! Anything you want to talk about?" Bernadette's eyes were wide and bright behind her glasses.

Amy plastered on a smile. "I read a book about trains." She wasn't ready to talk about it, not yet. Maybe she would start with Penny. Penny was her bestie, and Penny would come with alcohol.

Bernadette hesitated, but whatever she wanted to say, she kept it to herself. "Ok. If you say so. Happy new year, Amy." She waved and smiled as she turned and followed Howard, cute as a mushroom, but Amy wouldn't have wanted to meet her in a dark alley just then.

At least she had something to look forward to, Amy thought as she watched the couple walk to their car. Some reason not to sit home all day, just being miserable.

For one thing, most rats were far more affectionate than Sheldon.


	5. Chapter 5

Sheldon went to work. He didn't have anything else to do. The buses weren't running, so he walked. The university was echoing and empty on New Year's Day, and he could concentrate properly. No grad students in stupid shoes or nosy administrators or people wanting a signature on a postcard because someone had a baby or a funeral or some absurd thing like that. Or nosy roommates. Or girls, with white legs and sad eyes. Just him and the delightful chemical smell of the dry-erase marker.

It took him most of the day to work through the calculation. He didn't even notice he was squinting by the time he was done, the daylight almost gone.

Sheldon clapped himself on the shoulder. "Well done, Dr. Cooper! Now, to the mainframe!" He could set the simulation running overnight.

For the most part, he decided, it had been a good day. Sheldon stepped out of his office and nearly ran into Kripke, whom he had last seen drooling on his spot that morning.

"You missed a great party, Cooper!" Kripke said, falling in next to him. "Of course, it probably wouldn't have been so great if you were there. Still, your girl Amy is a party _animal_."

"I'm sure she is," Sheldon said. He was not going to think about Amy. He was going to think about his simulation.

"You going to see her now? Must be convenient to have her working here. You can take her straight home…" Kripke waggled his eyebrows in a completely offputting manner.

"I am going to the mainframe in Buckman," Sheldon informed him.

"…get her out of those glasses and cardigans…" Kripke whistled and made a shape vaguely resembling a stylized female body with his hands. "I'm telling you, if you ever break up, I am next. In. Line."

Then what he was saying caught up to Sheldon. "Amy is here?" Sheldon asked.

…and what Sheldon was saying caught up to Kripke. "You're going to the mainframe in Buckman?"

"Yes, I am. Amy is here?"

"Ran into her in the cafeteria with Wolowitz. Some robot rat grant proposal.I came in especially on New Year's Day_. I'm_ going to the mainframe in Buckman."

"No, I am." Sheldon said.

He remembered Howard saying something about checking with Amy about a project. He couldn't remember any robot rats. _I'd like a robot rat, if Amy builds one, _he thought.

"The hell you are!" Kripke shouted, and took off sprinting down the hall.

Sheldon frowned after him. Why…?

The mainframe!

He wasn't the world's best runner, but neither was Kripke. Along the hall, down the stairs, through the empty cafeteria - he was gaining - past the lobby - he nearly had him - across the parking lot…Sheldon skidded to a halt. That was Amy's car.

So? So it was Amy's car. Kripke was getting away.

Sheldon chased the other man into the computer lab, just in time to crash against the door before Kripke shut it in his face.

"You can't have it! I could be out right now, meeting chicks who's new year resolution is to stop dating hot men with tattoos!" Kripke panted. "And I put my name down a month ago!"

"But my simulation isn't _dumb_," Sheldon said, hands on his knees.

"Get out!" Kripke said.

"You get out." Sheldon straighted. "I'm not going anywhere."

"_I booked this time."_

"There's no need to yell," Sheldon said. "You can do your thing tomorrow."

"_You_ can do your thing tomorrow."

"But I don't want to, and my thing isn't dumb."

He didn't want to go home. He didn't want to go into his bedroom in particular, where books and model trains and his transformer doll were still scattered across the unmade bed.

Kripke set his jaw and took a step towards Sheldon…and Sheldon hit him.

Well, he tried. Well, it was more of a swat. Maybe, more accurately, a flail. Kripke swung back, aiming for Sheldon's nose but grazing his elbow instead. Sheldon pushed him and nearly fell down. Then Kripke, via a stroke of the fortune that smiles upon those dealing with madmen, managed to land a real punch on Sheldon's jaw.

The pain was sharp, sudden, and clear as a bell. And it felt good.

Suddenly, the two scientists weren't fighting like sleepy bunny rabbits on stilts, but, if you squinted, like something tangentially approaching men.

Sheldon lunged at Kripke and knocked him back against a server rack. Kripke managed a sharp elbow in Sheldon's ribs, but then Sheldon had Kripke's lapels in his hands. He slammed him against the rack again. "Stay away from my…from my mainframe!"

Kripke twisted out of Sheldon's grasp and scooted across the room to the main terminal. "It's not your mainframe!"

_And who's fault is that?_ Sheldon thought. "That doesn't mean it's yours either!"

He stalked after Kripke, but the other physicist had already sat himself firmly down and was logging in.

Then Sheldon spotted the box of cable ties.


	6. Chapter 6

The rat did an adorable thing with its nose, nuzzling at Amy's palm. It was a shame that tommorow she was probably going to have to cut its head open to attach electrodes.

"You're serving the cause of humanity," Amy told it. "Which maybe isn't that great for you. Because you're a rat. Honestly, this isn't going to do much for rats. Sorry."

Maybe she could take it home? Oh dear. She was getting too friendly with her lab animals again. It was what she did when she went too long without having a real conversation with people. _That was quick, _she thought drily.

But here she was again, alone in a lab, probably the last person in the building. She had stayed after even Howard was gone to finish working through an idea, and on a project she wasn't even officially part of yet. It was fascinating work though, and a good team.

Amy put the rat back in its cage and reminded herself that breaking up with Sheldon was not going to be the end of her social life. She had other people in her life. Even Howard.

She grabbed her coat and wound her way out of the lab, past all the cages, computers, cables, welding tools, suspiciously feminine proto-android and the enormous robot arm.

Someone stomped by her in the corridor. "Your boyfriend is insane," he threw over his shoulder, then turned to walk backwards several steps. "You should see what he's done to himself in the mainframe lab. If you dump him after that, call me!" He gave her two thumbs up and a big grin. Amy thought he seemed vaguely familiar, but couldn't remember the name. Had he been at the party?

Caution fought with curiosity, but she was a scientist, and curiosity always won. Besides, she was going to run into Sheldon sometimes. That was life. It would be ok.

Howard had shown her the mainframe earlier, but the room looked dark and closed from the outside. Amy pushed the door open cautiously.

She blinked a few times, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Then she burst out laughing.

"Amy? Are you laughing at me?" Sheldon asked, trying hard to hold onto dignity.

"Of course i'm laughing at you," Amy choked out.

"That is unkind. I'm furthering the cause of science," Sheldon said. "If you would just be so kind as to get my phone from my jacket. And call Leonard. And tell him to bring a knife, I won't impose on you any more."

She shook her head. "I'm not letting you ruin Leonard's evening." Amy knew Penny had planned a date.

Sheldon glared at her for a moment, then looked away. Amy nearly burst out laughing again. For a moment, seeing him had been hard, but it was impossible to be hurt by a man who had somehow contrived to be stuck with both wrists above his head, cable tied to the upper bar of a server rack.

"Will...you untie me?" Sheldon asked, looking at her sideways and drawing on the childish mannerisms that were adorable sometimes, and sometimes drove her mad.

Amy shook her head. "Of course I will." She searched the room until she found a pen-knife in a drawer. "How exactly did you get into this situation?"

"I needed to use the mainframe," Sheldon said, as if that was an explanation.

"This is a novel way of using a computer, Dr. Cooper. Have you considered publishing?" She turned to him, but realized it wouldn't do. She couldn't reach his wrists. With a sigh, she put the knife down and dragged the table across the floor until Sheldon was sandwiched between it and the servers.

"Very droll, Dr. Fowler. I was keeping it out of Kripke's grubbing perverted ape-man hands and the insult to rational numbers he calls his work."

"So you tied yourself to the server." She clambered up onto the table. It wasn't terribly steady, but it would do if she stayed on her knees, and that put her a few inches higher than he was, and was just enough to reach the ties.

"I tied one wrist to the server. Kripke nefariously tied the other."

"Why did you do that?" Amy sawed at the left cable tie, none too carefully. If Sheldon picked up a few nicks, that was his own fault. She was almost pressed up against him, and that wasn't making her happy either. Nor the way her heart was beating, in that old, familiar way. Hearts were weird things too, come to think of it.

"So he couldn't get at it. Then he tied me up and left, so I win."

Amy held back a burst of laughter. "You can't exactly use it either."

"But neither can he." Sheldon nodded.

The cable tie was stubborn and her arms were getting tired. Maybe she should leave him here. It might teach him a lesson. Amy looked at Sheldon the way she might have at a dissected brain with a particularly interesting medical history.

"Amy?" Sheldon said tentatively.

She sighed. "You broke the toy so no one else could play with it."

"No! I am not a child! It's just so Kripke couldn't play with it."

"Sheldon, that is an incredibly childish thing to do," she snapped and went back to sawing at the cuff. She didn't care if she was leaning against him, his breath warm on her neck. "An incredibly obnoxious, selfish, self-centered, small-minded, mean, vain, greedy," she was plumbing the depths of her vocabualry, and loving it. All the names she had ever wanted to call him, and no reason to hold back. "Vindictive, egomaniacal, petty, absurd, querulous, narcissistic, pompous, short-sighted, callous, cold, cruel, hurtful thing to do!" Amy finished with a gasp, breathing hard, her mind finally blanking for more synonyms.

Sheldon looked up at her through his eyelashes, his face an inch away from hers, and said, "maybe I should be punished."

A slow drum started pounding in her head. It took a moment to process the words. Was this some ploy? Trick? Excuse? It was probably an innocent comment. With Sheldon, it was most likely that he really meant she should take away his favorite ice cream.

...and if it wasn't innocent? So what? She was done with him, wasn't she? But Amy discovered her hand resting on his shoulder anyway, the cable-ties forgotten.

Why not? He was tied up. Had tied himself up, and should bear the consequences. He couldn't push her away or run or hide, and she could just...take. Just to know what it was like, after all this time. Just a way to lock that door, forever, and stop wondering. A small, sweet vengeance, for everything he had ever done to her.

_How is that not petty and mean and vindictive? _Amy asked herself, but then she made the mistake of meeting Sheldon's eyes again. Cautious...and still, and calm. Sheldon shifted slightly and it pressed him closer to her. For a moment, Amy didn't feel entirely in control any more.

_Not that, _she decided, and kissed him hard on the mouth.


	7. Chapter 7

The kiss felt better than the punch.

Later, Sheldon would reflect that he might have worked that out for himself from first principles, rather than through this messy process of participant-observer, but just then it was a revelation.

Amy's lips were on his, and it almost hurt but it didn't, and then it was more than that. Her hands were on his neck and she was pressed all against him and, good grief, but there was no ignoring just how much she was shaped liked a girl. Then, somehow, her mouth was open and his was too and it was just ridiculous how wet and hot everything was. Amy was kissing him and there was nothing he could do about it.

Sheldon tugged desperatrely at the ties that held his hands, but it did no good. The plastic dug into his skin, but wouldn't budge. He couldn't push her away or duck from her touch, but then he deserved this, didn't he? He couldn't touch her or hold her. He was being punished.

She broke away, finally, and then she was just there, her hands on his chest. He had to say something. Why couldn't he say anything? Why wouldn't she say anything? How were they supposed to get anywhere, if they weren't _talking_? That was how people communicated, wasn't it? And still, his mind was a blank.

He tried his wrists again and couldn't tear his eyes away from Amy, so very close. Flushed cheeks and shallow breath, trembling just a bit, with parted lips and bright, bright eyes. He had never seen her like this.

_How is she doing this? _Amy wasn't tied to anything. How was she making herself stand there, with her eyes and her hands all like that, all of it right there, visible, physical, made up of spit and skin and heartstrings? Anyone could see. How could she be so brave? He tried twisting his hands until the cable ties hurt. Maybe the left one was a little looser? Not enough.

Amy leaned in close and Sheldon stopped breathing. She was going to kiss him again. She was. She wasn't. Her lips skimmed by and settled on his neck instead, and that also felt better than getting punched. She traced her way down to the hollow of his throat so lightly he should barely have noticed it, if only there had been anything else in the universe he was capable of noticing.

Then, when he was lost and distracted and not expecting it at all, she kissed him again. Sheldon thought that wasn't fair, but then none of this was fair. Amy was kissing him and there was nothing he could do about it, so he closed his eyes and kissed her back.

Sheldon kissed Amy, instead of letting Amy kiss him, and he had barely moved or done anything, but he knew she noticed. He could feel it in the way her hands tightened on her shoulders and her body shifted against him and her breathing changed.

Good god, it was a feedback loop! He knew she knew he knew she liked this! There they were, spread out like junk at a garage sale. The fears and the desires, all the _needing_, all the _wanting_, all the secret things, dragged out into the sun and there for him to see. _How is she doing this? Why hasn't she run away yet? _

When they broke apart again, and she was staring at him like she had never seen him before either, Sheldon felt the pradigm shift in his bones. He knew Amy Farrah Fowled better now than he had known Amy Farrah Fowler fifty seconds earlier. Only, fifty second earlier, he would have confidenly said it was not possible to know Amy Farrah Fowler better than he knew her, because learning everything about her had been the best thing in his life for three years.

The left cable-tie snapped where Amy had sawed at it before, and suddenly Sheldon had a free hand. He reached for her without thinking and touched her face. He hadn't been able to, last night. He had wanted to, but it had been too much. What if someone had come in just then? What if she had woken up? But she was awake now and he touched her anyway, because he had to _know_.

He ran his finger along her jaw and she closed her eyes and leaned in close, silent and solemn, and then she bit her lips. There was nothing for it but to follow, and he traced her lower lip with his thumb and felt the tiny shudder that ran through her like it was the earthquake that was finally going to fling Los Angeles into the ocean.

It hit him like a bus. _This might be what all the sex fuss is about. _

"Amy," he whispered. But Amy only closed her eyes tighter and shook her head. "Amy, I-"

She caught his hand and drew it away from her face. For a moment, she was still, but then she opened her eyes and she was pulling away and letting go, and Sheldon was left stranded and alone, moored to the mainframe.

Amy climbed off the table, and gave him one last look bit her lip again before she turned away, and this time he was too far away to do anything about it.

* * *

**Note: at last, I get to something of the smut I promised! This story took a slightly darker turn than I originally planned, but I suppose, like everyone, that i'm just working out my season 6 issues. Thank all you guys so much for the reviews! It's really motivating to know someone is reading, and really cool and interesting to see what draws your attention and reactions. Thank you!**


	8. Chapter 8

It was a relief when the alarm went off and she could get out of bed. Amy pushed aside the covers and stumbled to her bathroom.

She had slept in Sheldon's shirt again, the one she had gone home in the morning of the breakup. She was not - was not - doing that self-indulgent girly moping thing and holding on to his smell or anything of the sort. She slept in his shirt because she would need to launder it before she gave it back (that was just good manners) and washing things after just one wearing wasteful. Also, it turned out to be more comfortable to sleep in than eleven yards of Canadian flannel. So there.

All right, so she hadn't slept very much. Mostly she had stared at the ceiling, the evening before playing itself over and over in her head and casting a disconcertingly accurate shadow of memory on her skin. So he had kissed her last night. So what? It had taken three years and being tied up. That didn't count.

Sheldon's bright green shirt with it's impenetrable comic-book symbol reflected guiltily in the bathroom. Why not do the girly moping thing? She was a girl, and she could do the girl things, if she wanted. People in romance novels did it all the time, and it seemed terribly sweet and pleasantly tortured. _I can do that. _

Someone knocked on the door.

_Sheldon_. She recognized the quick triple knock even before it was inevitably raised to its second power.

Her first instinct was simply to not answer the door. Her second instinct was that he knew exactly when she set her alarm and there was no chance whatsoever that he had arrived coincidentally, and that he was perfectly capable of standing in the hall all day.

_Why did I have to live on the fifth floor? _Amy wondered, and then she took a deep breath and went to open the door.

"What do you want?"

Whatever Sheldon had been intending to say, he didn't manage. He just looked down at her, fumbling for words. The possibility of standing on tiptoe and wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him flashed through her mind with brutal clarity.

"Ah...I wanted to show you something. And I will need my shirt back - it's the odd-numbered Wednesdays shirt. Which tommorow is."

"All right, a legitimate request," Amy allowed and stepped back to let him in. Sheldon walked past her into the apartment and took a seat on the couch, looking at her expectantly.

Amy still hovered at the door. She would go and get dressed and give him back his shirt, any minute now. The return of all previously exhanged items after a breakup was a staple of romantic movies, after all. There was a protocol to follow here. Then he would be gone and it would all be over with. Right away. She was going.

She sat on the other end of her sofa instead. "What did you want to show me?"

"Well," Sheldon said evenly, "considering recent developments in our relationship, I wanted to offer you a neck massage this morning."

_Did he say what I think he said?_"Excuse me?"

"It's part of my five-year plan for achieving coitus. A gradual re-structuring of our relationship with defined goals at every stage. Starting with a weekly neck massage. I emailed you a PDF."

Was he serious? Amy stared at him, not sure what to say. She had wanted him to work on his issues, and he was, but this...and _five years! _It seemed like nothing more than a stalling tactic.

"No five-year plan has ever worked out well," she said.

"To the contrary." He sat back, offended. "Stalin's plans in the 1930s radically restructured the Soviet economy from an agricltural to an industrial basis."

"They also reduced half the Ukrainian peasantry to cannibalism! Is that what you want?" Amy said.

"Pros and cons," Sheldon said. "And mutual nibbling is in the stage slated to commence in November of 2015."

Amy rolled her eyes and turned her back to him. She couldn't bear to look at him any more. If she did, his beseeching eyes would make her agree to his ridiculous plan eventually. "No."

She was about to stand up, stomp off to her bedroom to change her clothes and then fling his shirt in his face and leave for work. Then he stopped her with his hand on her shoulder.

"I thought this was what you wanted," Sheldon sounded baffled, and his hand still lingered on her shoulder.

"It's not just about the sex, Sheldon," Amy said. His thumb was drawing slow circled on the back of her neck. It was incredibly distracting.

"It's not?" He squeezed her shoulders with both hands. She couldn't see his face, but he managed to convey a kind of hopeless confusion in the touch. Where had that been, these past years?

"No. It's not about the sex," she said, but wasn't it thought? Amy didn't pull away. Couldn't. "It's about how you treat me. The things you say. All...all of that." His hands felt so. damn. good. Did he even notice what he was doing to her? "That's why I broke up with you."

His hands froze, suddenly heavy. Amy could sense him go completely still. "You broke up with me?"

"I said, 'goodbye, Sheldon.'"

"Yes, and then you _left_. That is the common etiquette."

Amy shook her head. He hadn't noticed her breaking up with him. That was so...so...just so...

Well, actually, it wasn't very surprising. Her own fault for not putting it in writing, really. Sheldon couldn't help what he noticed and what he didn't. A tiny spark of something like guilt lit up inside her - enough of life went over his head without her adding to it. She knew. She had watched life go over her head for years. It would be still, if it wasn't for Penny - and Bernadette, and Howard and Raj, and their gag with the online dating profile and...and...well, and Sheldon.

"I see." Sheldon said and leaned away from her. "Well, if you've broken up with me, there's not much use for a five year plan, is there? I still need my shirt back, Amy Farrah Fowler."

She loved it when he used her full name. She had no idea why, she just did.

"Of course, Sheldon," Amy said properly.

At that point, 49% of her was frozen in disbelieving, petrified horror at what she was about to do. 51% would have been too, but 51% was too busy doing it.

"Here's your shirt," she said, and pulled it smoothly over her head. Sheldon had been about to say something, but it died in his throat.

Amy handed him the shirt over her shoulder, without turning. She wasn't wearing anything under it.


	9. Chapter 9

This, Sheldon decided, was what they called a mixed signal.

"Here's your shirt," Amy said and handed it to him. "You can go now."

That meant that she wanted him to go.

On the other hand, when a woman took off all her clothes, that could be construed as an invitation for a sexual encounter. (Movies had taught him that.) Therefore, that might mean she wanted him to stay.

a.) That was terribly forward of her.

b.) He wanted to do what she wanted him to do, if he could figure out what that was.

c.) He did not want a sexual encounter with Amy. Probably.

d.) He hadn't breathed in quite a long time.

Sheldon drew a deep breath and numbly took his shirt.

So, to summarize, he did not know what she wanted, he did not know what he wanted, and he had no idea what to do. It was quite a lot of information to add up to so few conclusions. Nothing statistically significant. People stuff! This never happened in maths.

He needed more data. "Amy? What are you doing?"

Then, he recalled the evening before, and experimentally pressed his palm to her back, between her shoulder blades. You could learn a lot by touching, apparently. Amy didn't say anything, but he could feel her flex, very slightly, sort of like a cat. He couldn't have quantified it, but it did not mean 'go away.'

She sighed. "I suppose I just want to make things..." she choked back a short laugh, "..._difficult _for you."

What was funny about 'difficult'? Still, all right - the jilted woman, the vengeful ex. Fair enough. He tried to remember if he had ever given her anything that might suffer from being flung out of a window in the throes of an emotional outburst.

"You broke up with me," he pointed out, and traced her spine to the small of her back. "That's quite difficult."

"Mm. I should have been clearer about that," she said. Her voice sounded funny. Her skin was smooth and warm, and the geometry of her back, the curves and planes of it, the way it all connected together, was just fascinating. He wished she would turn around and he could see her expression.

The blood rushed to Sheldon's cheeks in a hot, vicious wave. _Her face, just her face. _

He cleared his throat. "There's a form. Appendix C in the relationship agreement," he said.

Then again, there were a lot of things in the relationship agreement, and there was definitely no stroking of anyone's back (save in the case of the Heimleich maneuver or if either party needed to be nursed back to health after contracting malaria,) yet here he was, with both hands on her bare shoulders, following through on the neck massage he had promised.

"I'll email it," Amy said. Then, "but don't stop."

Mixed signals. She wanted to break up but she didn't want to stop this. Or, she knew he didn't like it and so was trying to make the breakup go faster. Only he would need to go and she wanted him to stay, unless she did want him to go. But, given the parameters of relationship agreement-

Amy made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a purr, and leaned back against him, and Sheldon found himself in the last place he had ever expected to be. He was, he firmly believed, better prepared to be transported to the surface of a distant exoplanet or to fend off an attack by a ravenous zombie hoard, than he was to deal with this here situation of a naked girl in his arms.

Jesus Christ, what was he supposed to do with his _hands_?

"It wasn't as complicated as I thought," he blurted out.

"What wasn't?" Amy asked.

"Yesterday evening, in the mainframe lab. The you-know-what."

"I don't know what," she said, altogether too brightly, from somewhere under his chin, snuggling more firmly against him.

Was she going to make him say it? "The KISSING_. _If you must know. I assumed a level of complexity on the order of badminton or cartwheels, but it was more like...frisbee, or tying shoelaces._" _

Amy looked up at him over her shoulder. "Sheldon, kissing is a reflexive instinct, prevalent in many mammel species. Everyone knows how to kiss."

Biology stuff. Yeah, right. Like you could rely on that. "You can't know that. Have you kissed everyone?"

"Almost everyone _has _kissed someone," she paused. "Including you."

"I didn't know," he said. Sheldon had long since simply assumed that that bit just didn't exist in him. Gene expression or brain structure or hormonal balance, that did the handshakes and the hugs and the kisses and all the things that seemed to take up so much of everyone else's time. It didn't exist, or was broken, or had gotten helpfully lost at some point along the way. It was odd to discover that it was there after all, and maybe not as atrophied as all that. Odd, and not entirely unpleasant. "I didn't know I could do that."

Amy twisted around, slid her arms around his neck and kissed him. It wasn't bad. Easier than the first time, too, and with his eyes closed and concentrating on Amy's lips, it was easier to ignore that whole business with the nakedness. His hands found someplace to go without being told, in her hair and around her waist. Maybe kissing was even easier than shoelaces.


	10. Chapter 10

How could something feel so good and be so scary at the same time?

Sheldon's hands on her, his lips, felt like relief. It was as if a car siren that had been going all night had finally been turned off, and here was the moment of quiet before the dawn.

Barely breaking away from kissing him, Amy fumbled for the hem of his shirt, and then for the hem of the other shirt, and Sheldon helped her pull them over his head. She let her fingertips press against his chest - his skin was desperately pale, but warm and solid and real.

Sheldon seemed to be doing his best just to keep breathing. His eyes moved constantly - meeting hers for a moment, then flickering away to the ceiling or the carpet or - Amy felt her entire body blush. Including parts of the human body that it was her professional opinion were incapable of blushing. Or possibly someone had set her on fire and she had not gotten around to noticing yet. _Sheldon is looking at my breasts. _

Was this really happening? Really about to happen? The moment, the sex, the _it_, here on her couch at seven in the morning on a Tuesday? _Oh my god. _

Sheldon jerked his wide, unblinking eyes back to her face. "Sorry."

_That's not right_. Amy shook her head, not sure she could speak. She reached for his hand and drew it up her body to cup her breast. Sheldon stared at her, frozen, his hand resting on her skin. It felt good, but intrusive. Wasn't that the point? Her heart was pounding but everything else terribly still, the whole room trapped in amber. She didn't know what to do now.

"Say something," Sheldon said. That wasn't helpful. She couldn't do this _alone_.

"Are you ok?" It was the only thing she could think of.

"Of course," he said, but his expression hovered somewhere between paralysis and stark raving terror. "This is slightly faster than my plan called for, but the underlying principles appear to be universal."

Yeah, was that Sheldon's idea of dirty talk? _Sexy_.

He swallowed and never looked away from her eyes, but his thumb drew a hesitant, stumbling circle over her nipple. It sent a jolt of sensation straight down her spine, raw and intense.

It was too much. Amy pulled away, as far as she could, and tugged her quilt of granny squares to cover herself. Her actual granny had made that for her. She couldn't just _have sex _on it!

"Amy? What did I do wrong?" Sheldon looked so vulnerable and confused she couldn't bear look at him,.

"Nothing. It's..." What? She was the one who had gotten him here. She couldn't be the one to back out, could she?

"All the contemporary research agrees that nipples are an erogenous zone. If you don't like having your nipples touched, you should probably see a physician."

"Sheldon!" Amy was almost screaming, and she felt the hot prickle of tears coming. She couldn't listen to this. What would her mother say? She hugged the quilt tighter to her, hiding, but her skin was over-sensitive. The feeling of the rough texture on her breasts was almost unbearable.

"I am trying!" Sheldon had raised his voice. That was enough to snap her into looking at him again. He had gone even paler than usual, somehow. "Trying a lot."

Amy hunched down under his anger. He never yelled. Why was he yelling now? Why couldn't he just go back to looking past her and talking about what would happen if cats were uplifted and allowed to vote?

"I'm sorry fucking me is a such a chore!" she shouted.

The oath did its job. He jerked to his feet and stumbled back, away from her. Slapping him would have gotten less of a reaction.

"Amy!"

"Get out!"

A moment of stillness, and then Sheldon darted forward to grab one of the three of his shirts that had built up on the couch. Then he was gone, without even closing the door behind him. For the second time in as many days, Sheldon had left her alone, clutching a blanket, but...might he have gone through with it, just to keep her from leaving? That was a good thing, surely. It showed how much he cared, right?

Wrong. "Jerk." Amy muttered under her breath, and then the tears came. She didn't want to be a project, she knew that much.

_Oh, use your eyes, Fowler. _Her inner voice snapped. This time, she had been the one who pushed him out. There was only so much she could blame Sheldon for. Kissing him had felt so, so good, but that was easy. Sex was...she didn't know what sex was.

She had thought she was ready, she had thought that this was what she wanted, but what if she just wasn't ready? What did that mean, actually, being ready? Was there a list? Was it like an avocado, where sometimes you needed to give it a few days? Could you see the difference between _ready _and _not ready _on an MRI?

_Maybe some people are never ready_. Maybe she just didn't have it in her, and it wasn't Sheldon at all, but her that had been the problem all along. She just wasn't made for feeling all those things, the pleasure and the fireworks and all of that, and maybe she should just learn to live with that already.

She could still feel every line he had traced on her back like railways cutting through the landscape. _Please, please go away. _


	11. Chapter 11

"I'm sorry!" Amy dashed into the lab, out of breath. "I'm sorry i'm late!"

Howard looked up from the piece of code he had been working on and took in the sight of his colleague, friend's roomate's girlfriend, member of wife's circle, and, at the end of the day, tentative friend in her own right. _Uh oh_. "Amy, you're not late. It's ten to eight."

Amy looked at the clock on the wall. "Oh." She seemed to practically deflate. "It feels like I should be late."

"What is it?" Howard asked, but what he meant was, _what did Sheldon do? _Sometimes he wondered if, in the final reckoning, getting Amy to meet Sheldon was going to count for or against him. Then he remembered Jews didn't have that and he really should feel bad about this on Yom Kippur instead, but whatever.

"Nothing," Amy said, grinning in panic. "Nothing at all."

"Your socks are mismatched, your cardigan is buttoned up wrong and your hair clip is on the other side," he pointed out.

Amy clapped her hand to her head, then threw her bag down and collapsed despondently on a chair. "We broke up. I mean, I broke up. He didn't notice."

_Woah!_ "That's..." What was he supposed to say? 'Good for you', 'congrats' and 'awesome', all occurred to him. Howard patted Amy's shoulder instead and settled for "there, there. It'll be ok. What happened?"

Amy sighed. "After the New Year's party. I couldn't deal with him anymore."

"I see." Howard remembered Bernadette giggling into his neck with a certain optimism after Sheldon had stomped in on them that night, but he had been more skeptical. They should have bet on it - he might have gotten sex or TV privleges. "So last night he finally noticed you broke up?"

"This morning," she said, looking at her hands. "He came over."

"Huh. You'd think the one good thing about dating Sheldon is that you really can break up by text message in morse code? Sheldon Cooper - no muss, no fuss." He was trying to cheer her up, but she only looked more miserable. He was not doing really well at this, was he?

Amy glanced at him, then looked away. "There was muss," her voice was tiny.

Oh. OH. She couldn't mean...no, she did mean. There was only one way to read that blush. Howard took the chair next to her and planted his fists on his knees. Another man might have shied away from discussing those most intimate details of a friend's life, but Howard Wolowitz was the all-time reigning champion of excruciatingly uncomfortable coversations with women about sex. Compared to that time at that conference in Orlando with that roboticist with that business with the toes, this was a walk in the park. Besides, talking about Sheldon and Amy's sex-life was less gossiping about his friends and more the collection of unique scientific data. "Ok, let's hear it."

"There was kissing," she said sideways. "Mostly naked kissing."

His mental giggle sounded quite a bit like Bernadette. "And?"

"And then I freaked out and told him to leave." Amy buried her face in her hands. "What is wrong with me?"

_Didn't see that coming. _"Usually that would be a complicated question, but given your circumstances, what's wrong with you is Sheldon."

Amy looked up to glare at him. "Why are you always so mean to him?"

_He _was mean to _Sheldon_? There was the slightly crazy Amy he knew and loved! "Because I know he can be better, when he tries." Howard touched the wedding ring on his hand unconsciously. "If I could pull it off, so can Sheldon."

"He did try. It was my fault."

"It's not your fault."

"How do you know?"

"I know Sheldon-"

"You're being mean again," Amy said.

"I know Sheldon, in his own crazy, crazy way, cares a hell of a lot about you."

"Oh."

#

Sheldon opened the door. "Bernadette, hello. Penny isn't here. Leonard isn't here either."

Bernadette smiled sweetly and slipped past him into the apartment. "I was looking for you."

Sheldon closed the door and frowned down at her. "Why?"

"I want to surprise Howard and Amy. They're going to be working really late. We'll get a pizza and take it over there and have a nice dinner with them."

"Tonight is Thai food night," Sheldon said.

"Oh don't give me that!" Bernadette resisted stamping her foot. She was not going to let a miserable, lonely Amy ruin a cute surprise dinner for her and her husband. Even more importantly, she was not going to let him _make _Amy lonely and miserable, for once. "We can get Thai food. Or you can have a pizza on Tuesday. It won't kill you."

"But tonight is..." he drifted off with nothing of his usual conviction. Something was off about him, but she couldn't put her finger on what.

"Tonight is what?"

Sheldon shrugged and waved her away. "Well, Amy broke up with me, so it's not a very good plan."

"Oh, Sheldon. Why?"

"Some nonsense about coitus."

"I thought you were, you know, making progress in that department." It was a guess, but one she was fairly sure of, from Amy's hints and smiles.

"Thank you! Me too," Sheldon said as if it were self-evident. "I stayed up all night and made a five-year plan."

Bernadette frowned, then shrugged. "I suppose a developing country with a centralized economy is as good a metaphor for your sexuality as anything."

"Exactly." Sheldon nodded. "I did the required reading. I could do a degree in sex. I know everything about sex."

"You don't know the first thing about sex."

"That is also true." He admitted. "Apparently. There's an agreement, there's a plan. It's all nice and simple. There's structure and order and a logical progression based on reasonably sound research. What's wrong with that?"

_Oh, for heaven's sake!_ Leonard really should have had this talk with the kid a long time ago. Why did she have to do everything around here?

"If you wanted simple and ordered and nothing else, why go out with Amy in the first place?" she asked, as gently as she could.

Sheldon hung his head, like a child caught stealing a cookie. "I like her?"

Bernadette suddenly figured out what seemed off. He was only wearing one t-shirt. A green one, and it looked a little on the crumpled side. Unnoticeable on anyone else, on Sheldon the visibility of elbows was downright jarring. Sheldon always wore two shirts, that was what Sheldon did. She saw him differently then, as if something else had peeled away with the habitual uniform. Not a robot or a brain in a jar or genius or a freak, not a collection of phobias and conditions, but just for a moment, only a guy trying to figure out what to do about a girl.

"Sheldon?"

"Yes?"

It was like ripping off a bandaid, but it had to be done. Bernadette did not believe in coddling. "Are you in love with Amy?"

Sheldon stared at her in shock, as if she had done something truly obscene, and then almost visibly took control of himself again. He shrugged and almost smiled. "Like I would even know?"

_Oh dammit._

Bernadette hurried across the room, grabbed the brown chair, placed it next to him, climbed up, and wrapped him in a smothering hug. "You know."


	12. Chapter 12

Sheldon watched Bernadette smile to herself as she sent a text message to Howard.

"That's that taken care of," she said.

"Are you sure?" Sheldon peered over her shoulder. He didn't want to run into Howard. This was...well, this was private. "Why would he possibly want to meet you in the library?"

Bernadette looked up from the screen quickly, then adjusted her glasses with a smile. "I make a very convincing librarian. Now go talk to Amy. Shoo." She practically shoved him towards the Buckman building while she went in the opposite direction, towards the library.

"Thank you for the ride," he called after her, but Bernadette only waved and kept walking, a certain spring in her step.

There was no putting it off. Sheldon went to find the girl who, until a certain form was filled out, was still a girl who was his girlfriend.

Knock, knock, knock. Amy. The door was actually open, but there was no reason not to observe protocol. Knock, knock, knock. Amy. She looked up from where she leaned over a microscope. Knock, knock, knock. Amy. Which made the last knock redundant, strictly speaking. _Huh_.

"Sheldon," Amy said. "What are you doing here?"

"Well, you haven't filed the form in Appendix C." He pulled his copy of the relationship agreement out of his bag.

"Where would I file it?"

"Er..." They should have an agency for this sort of thing. He would write his congressman. "With Leonard," Sheldon decided. "He's responsible for the group's social life, formalizing it is well overdue."

Amy shook her head, but she smiled a little. "Give me the form then," she said, and held out her hand.

She looked very far away, suddenly, past stacks of hardware and a row of microscopes and bundles of cables snaking across the floor and Howard's ridiculous robot arm. It took a ridiculous amount of effort to cross some fifteen feet.

"Here," he arrived at her side, at last, and put the form in front of her.

"I don't have a pen," she said.

"Silly Amy. Here you-" he rummaged through his bag, but couldn't find one either. He definitely had one, it had just gotten buried under all that stuff Bernadette had insisted he buy when they stopped at the gas station, even though the car hadn't been out of gas at all. Well, and all the stuff he had insisted on buying after he bought the stuff Bernadette insisted on. "Just a moment." It was there somewhere.

"I'm sorry, about this morning," Amy said. "I shouldn't have gotten mad at you, and I shouldn't have pushed you into things you don't want to do."

He shrugged and blushed. A lot. "That's all right."

"It is?"

"Relationships involve the needs of two people. Apparently. Which takes compromise." Bernadette had explained that at great length.

"I don't want that. I don't want to be your compromise."

"You're not a compromise. I like you. Leonard's choice in dish washing liquid - now that's a compromise."

"I don't want intimacy to be a compromise." She touched the relationship agreement, and Sheldon remembered he was looking for a pen. "I didn't know that, when I signed this. I do now."

"That doesn't make any sense, you know," he said. "We talk about everything, we share intellectual persuits, we spend a great deal of time together, which I believe is mutually enjoyable."

"It is."

"Coitus, on the other hand, is merely the expression of a basic evolutionary drive which has nothing to do with any of the important parameters of our relationship." Sheldon found a pen.

"You're right, I suppose," Amy said.

"The don't break up with me."

She took the pen from his hand. "No."

"That doesn't make sense."

"I know. But people don't make sense."

"I make sense," Sheldon said.

The slanted look Amy gave him from under her eyebrows was unnecessarily eloquent.

_Knock, knock, knock. _Sheldon blinked in shock. Maybe he didn't make sense, sometimes.

People - all of them, the whole darn-tootin' lot - suddenly shifted into a slightly different focus. They were not sensible, no, not reasonable or well organized or comprehensible, but neverthelss it was as if the whole human race had become Texans, and they were chock full of things he understood, despite himself.

For a brief, staggering and extremely rare moment - maybe the first one in his life - Sheldon didn't feel weird.

Amy signed the form in Appendix C and pushed it away from her, then put the pen down firmly. Sheldon took them back. His whole body seemed to have gone slightly numb. He couldn't feel the pen in his hand.

"Well, now that you're not my girlfriend, I want to ask you something."

"All right."

"Will you be my girlfriend?"

Amy bit her lip. "No."

"That's all right, that wasn't really what I wanted to ask you."

Amy blinked. "Ok...?"

Once, a long time ago, Leonard had done the maths wrong and almost blown up the apartment. 'There is no try', Yoda had said. 'Do or do not.' So Sheldon had grabbed the smoking canister and pushed Leonard out of the elevator, without quite knowing if it was right or if it would work.

Strange, to be in such a situation again, feeling as though he must act or else something was going to blow up. So he kissed her, quick, clumsy and startlingly sweet.

"Will you be my lover?"

"Yes."


	13. Chapter 13

"Yes."

Amy pressed her fingers to her lips, as if trying to catch the word, too late. She should have thought about it, or at least pretended to think about it, or hesitated just for show, but she didn't. What a silly thing to do, when she had known for such a long time that the answer, if the question ever came, would be _yes_?

Besides, she quite liked the notion of being a little slutty.

Notions were one thing, reality was another. She had said 'yes', and now what? Amy felt as shy as a mouse in a sweater.

Sheldon too seemed to have run out of initiative. He was looking down at her with amazement, breathing fast. Amy half expecxted him to take it back. _Just kidding. Gotcha. _Instead he said, "yes?"

No? She could end this, and let them both go. _No. Bazinga_. It was very possible that the night was about to become truly excruciating. "Yes."

So much for that.

"Here." Sheldon rummaged through his bag, pulled out a bottle of wine and shoved it into her hands.

Amy didn't even have time to read the label before he added several bulky scented candles that were strong enough, even unlit, to make her sneeze.

"Sheldon?"

"Wait..." He went on searching, handing her items as he found them, until Amy was worried she was about to drop the whole lot, balancing it with her chin. A box of heart-shaped chocolates, lavender bath oil, what seemed to be a silk pillowcase, and...

"Is that potpourri?" Amy asked.

"Yes, the gas station didn't have any rose petals. And they only had Barry White on a cassette tape." He held up the tape triumphantly.

Amy deposited it all in a heap on the counter. "What is all this stuff?"

Sheldon frowned. "I am trying to seduce you."

"Oh. That's nice." She looked around, but there was really no way to play the tape. "Let's have a drink," she suggested.

"I don't drink."

"You brought the wine," Amy pointed out.

"It's part of the ritual."

Amy shrugged and used a pair of scissors to open the wine. Bits of the cork fell in, but that didn't seem very important. She took a sip straight from the bottle - _who's a nerd now, eh? _- and a thought occured to her. "Did you get condoms?"

He blushed! God, but the boy could blush! "Yes," he managed to squeak out.

"Are you sure you don't want any wine? It might make things easier."

Sheldon looked down, then up. "Isn't that cheating?"

Could you cheat at sex? _Idiot_. And yet...he had come to her like a knight to the field, it seemed, willing to do battle, (with himself, if no one else.) There was something in that, Amy found, and she felt the thorny knot of anger and hurt grow a little softer. All she wanted in that moment, terribly, terribly much, was to wrap him in as much kindness as she had to give, and to see if perhaps it might not be returned.

"Let's cheat," Amy said, and handed him the bottle.

Sheldon looked at her, then drank and made a face. "Yuck."

She shrugged, "yeah," and took the bottle back and kissed him. It was a slow, quiet kiss, alone in the world. It was almost familiar now, almost comfortable, and he met her there. She tasted the wine on his lips, bitter-sweet.

They finished about half the bottle. Leaning against the counter and exploring, experimenting. Long kisses and quick ones. His tongue in her mouth and his hands on her hips, pulling her close_. I could do this all night._

She had nearly forgotten that that wasn't all, when Sheldon fumbled for the buttons of her cardigan. _Oh my. _Amy stood still and bit her lip, and let him open the buttons one by one, and then move on to the buttons of the shirt under it, his fingers now skimming against her bare skin.

"Ok?" he asked.

"Ok."

He pushed the shirt and sweater off her shoulders and down, his hands brushing down her arms, and Amy felt a shiver of arousal dance through her body like a flame above a candle. She wondered if he could see it. This, she had never shared with anyone before. Which, come to think of it, was rather the point of the exercise.

Amy smiled, took Sheldon's hand and pulled him towards the old sofa that stood against the wall of the lab. No doubt many a grad-student had caught a nap on it. No doubt they had done other things, too. A proud tradition, she decided. They tumbled onto it together, and Amy reached up to turn off the harsh neon lights. In the faint bluish glow of the computer screens, she could just make out Sheldon's eyes on her. The wine was a soft, not-unpleasant buzz in her head. She could have concentrated and shaken her head and that would probably have dissipated it, but she didn't.

_Right_. She kicked off her shoes. Tights next. That was a bit awkward and required some contortion. She ended up on top of Sheldon somehow, kissing again. His fingers trailed trough her hair and over her bare shoulders, not confident, but not fliching either, hooking her bra strap along the way. They looked at eachother, serious and absurd, and then Sheldon smiled like he was trying to keep a secret and smoothly unhooked her bra.

Amy blinked. "That went easily."

She felt him shrug. "I have excellent spatial reasoning skills."

"Good point."

There was nothing for it now but to take off the rest of their clothes, really. Amy had been waiting all night - all year, possibly. Or forever - for things to become easy. To be swept away and melt inside and become torrents of lava and leaves on the wind. That wasn't happening, and it now occured to her that it never would.

"Sex is weird," she whispered.

"I believe you're right," Sheldon answered, and he sounded like that was about as good as things could possibly be.

Amy was a little bit drunk and quite turned-on, and pressed against Sheldon in the dark, and she realized that it would still be a choice. Tights. Skirt. Shoes. Shirts. Pants. Moment by awkward moment, each of them a precipice. Condoms. Damn, where were the condoms? A decision with every touch - to share more, know more, show more. Bodies were so odd, so vulnerable. They were tangled together, naked, breathing hard. Strange, intimate, brittle things, these moments, so dense with the things you could share with no one else.

It wasn't perfect and there were no fireworks, but Amy pulled him closer and shifted her hips and for a while there wasn't any space between them to get lost in. It was enough.

~ The End ~


End file.
